"Frog Woman Rock" from "Arrivals" (2013) by David Wilson was commissioned for the program.

"Frog Woman Rock" from "Arrivals" (2013) by David Wilson was commissioned for the program.

Photo: Unknown

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"BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For" by Josh Faught is installed at the Neptune Society Columbarium.

"BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For" by Josh Faught is installed at the Neptune Society Columbarium.

Photo: Ian Reeves

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SFMOMA displays artworks in diverse settings

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About six months into its three-year closure for expansive reconstruction, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has so far done well in keeping its brand in the mind's eye of the regional art public.

The 2013 version - selected in 2012 - takes the form of commissioned projects by four Bay Area artists in dramatically diverse settings. They not only depart from objects-in-a-room convention but betoken the spectrum of media, motivation and presentation that may inform 21st century art, and their uncertain risks and rewards for an audience.

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New Orleans native Zarouhie Abdalian, also showing for two more weeks in the Berkeley Art Museum's Matrix Program, has situated bells out of sight atop four buildings surrounding Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, which fronts Oakland City Hall.

At a different time each day, specified on the museum's website, the bells will chime simultaneously, causing people to ponder their source and what might occasion their sounding.

At a weekday preview a little after 1 p.m., people scattered around the plaza visibly paused to wonder what the unaccustomed chiming might signal - a test of some sort, a mistimed tolling of the hour, a call to attention - but from whom? - an obscure ritual event.

The most striking effect of Abdalian's piece may have been the brief connection it made among random strangers. Familiarity, publicity and word of mouth may gradually turn that connection more conversational.

Built in 1898 for the Odd Fellows Cemetery, whose occupants had to be reburied in Colma after San Francisco prohibited burials, and later cremation, within the city, the Columbarium gradually deteriorated as a succession of institutions took control of it. The Neptune Society acquired it in 1980 and restored it handsomely.

Partly because its restoration so nearly coincided with the early years of the AIDS crisis, the Columbarium began to take on special meaning for the LGBT community. Faught's pieces quietly evoke this fact.

Titled "BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For," his three connected pieces celebrate and to an extent satirize the practice of adorning the urn niches of deceased loved ones with objects and messages of special significance - to the survivors, anyway.

Faught annexes the ready-made sentiments and humor of greeting cards and slogan-blazoned buttons, as if bemused by people's difficulty finding sincere idioms of expression in a culture of synthetic sentiment.

Beneath the symbols and jokes threaded into Faught's work - note the witch's feet in one piece and think of "The Wizard of Oz" - lies a call to authenticity of feeling in a setting of quiet solemnity.

Jonn Herschend has produced a short film titled "Stories From the Evacuation," online only at www.sfmoma.org/stories.

It begins as apparently straightforward documentary of the museum's shift of its collections to off-site storage and the temporary relocation of its staff. But Herschend smuggled actors among his genuine interview subjects, and the film abruptly begins to stalk one of them into her melodramatic - and completely fictional - private life: a wry vision of public imagination losing its way during the museum's closure.

David Wilson has set up a sort of kiosk at the closed Third Street entrance to SFMOMA. There drawings and maps will direct visitors to a series - changing with time - of sites of various installations and performances.

The first is the display in a Presidio eucalyptus grove of a framed landscape drawing, some 16 feet high, propped against a tree. Wilson characteristically made the drawing of a natural rock face north of Cloverdale on site, on two dozen folded paper sheets. The image on its sutured sheets will deteriorate quickly in the far from moisture-proof frame.

Although no particular piece may prove daunting to visit, seeing the 2012 SECA series whole will tax the stamina of all but the most committed museum followers.